One of the major drivers of global warming is the greenhouse gases we emit by burning fossil fuels. Another major driver of global warming and one of the ways in which we are making our earth unsustainable for human life is the population explosion. When I was young the earth’s population was around 3 billion. It has more than doubled. When we talk about the growth of population, the crucial issue is about the time it would take to double. Population can double in as little as a generation. We are on the way to an earth with 12 billion people and counting. The devastation that is causing and will cause is incalculable and will make the earth inhospitable in short order, contributing to the overuse of water, the over fishing of the oceans, the deforestation of the jungles, the overuse of carbon based fuels even while we try to flush them out of the atmosphere and every other form of damage to the earth we depend on.

That makes population policy a tremendously important issue worldwide. Years ago we used to talk about ZPG, zero population growth. The idea had been talked about for centuries but a best-selling book, The Population Bomb, written by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, helped make it a movement in 1968. Just a few years later, the movement was hijacked by the national battle over abortion. But population growth did not suddenly become unimportant. It remains at the root of the unsustainability of the world we inhabit.

We have a choice, we can curb the growth of population voluntarily, or an angry earth will do it to us, reducing our children and grandchildren to refugees, beggars, and marauders and leaving them to die of thirst and starvation or gasping for oxygen, if they are not killed by armed bands looking for the scraps of the earth.

Naysayers like to point out that Malthus’ prediction of worldwide starvation has not yet come true. But the evidence that Malthus’ prediction is coming true is all around us. Lands once fertile are becoming deserts. Trees once crucial to a sustainable atmosphere are being chopped down at alarming rates in the southern hemisphere with worldwide consequences. Fish stocks have been shrinking and even more important, the coral reefs that are at the base of the oceanic food chain are dying. May Malthus rest in peace, but we are seeing what he feared. Human beings have never been good at listening to prophets. Those of us living now can’t claim we were not warned. We can only claim that too many people scoffed as they scoffed at the prophets of old. The earth will have its revenge.

I do not want to treat abortion as part of this problem because it raises so many separate issues and debates. But I do want to treat almost every other method of birth control as very much part of the issue. Whatever your faith, we have an obligation to life, to treat our world with the respect it deserves. Religious proclamations about populating the earth made thousands of years ago have been accomplished, and must now be subordinated to religious and secular claims about life, about treating each other as required by the Golden Rule, about protecting the soil and the air and the water that give us all life. There is no escape from that injunction. Or the earth will have its revenge. Make sure the people you elect start protecting us from world-wide disaster.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 15, 2016.

I just got back from Chicago where I attended a national meeting of political scientists. One of them described at length the local, national and international barriers to doing anything about climate change. His basic point was that those whose livelihood seemed to depend on activities that are bringing on climate change are strategically placed to prevent the rest of us from doing anything. His point is that to make anything happen it would be necessary to make people come to think about what they are doing as wrong in the teeth of evidence that it is good for them in their own lifetimes. That also makes them totally resistant to the idea that climate change is happening, that human activity is a substantial cause of the change, that it will do any damage and that it is worth dealing with. Ouch for the rest of us.

Then I attended a meeting where the speaker described the change of ideas. He regarded those changes as inexplicable. For most of human history war had been considered noble, a good thing, that made people stronger and better. Then just before World War I, that started to change. After that war, no one makes claims about the generic benefit of war – war has become an occasionally necessary evil, but not a good thing. And for most of human history, people had slaves. Those that could would. Slaves and slavery were valued. It made you a big shot, and made your life easier. Then suddenly in the eighteenth century it changed dramatically in Europe. England began to block the slave trade and shortly it was banned in Latin America, the serfs were freed in Russia, and only the U.S. clung to slavery of the modern nation states.

In the speaker’s description, both ideas turned in reaction to novels that separately described war and slavery as disgusting, as indeed they are. In regard to war, the novel described the scene of rotting and dismembered corpses on a battlefield. In the case of slavery, another novel described the brutality of the way slaves were treated. Both of course were accurate. The facts, however, were not new. What was new was disgust.

I’m no novelist but global warming is disgusting. Global warming is an extinction of ourselves. We and our children and children’s children will be strewn on nature’s battlefield gasping for water and air, our bellies distended for lack of food, our homes lost to the elements, our skin alternately burned and frozen, unable to protect our children, wives, husbands or parents, indeed some will become too desperate to care. Global warming will take everything from us that makes us human. It has been doing that piecemeal in the aftermath of storms that have left people totally destitute in parts of the world. It will exceed our capacity to put people back on their feet as the oceans take back the coasts. It will poison us, as a warming climate spreads diseases for which we have no defenses, leaving us to rot from diseases few of us have seen and none of us care to see except as the noblest of doctors and nurses. It will extinguish our food supplies and it is attacking the supply of the air we breathe.

Global warming is disgusting. Pass it on.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, April 8, 2014.